Search engines provide a powerful tool for locating content in documents in a large database of documents, such as the documents on the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW), and/or the documents stored on the computers of an Intranet. The documents are located using an index of documents in response to a search query, consisting of one or more words, terms, keywords and/or phrases, henceforth called terms, that are submitted by a user. Documents in the index of documents may be matched to one or more terms in the search query to determine scores. A ranked listing of relevant documents or document locations, based on the scores, is provided to the user.
Users, when using search engines to find relevant documents, desire the most relevant results to be presented first. Search engines use a variety of methods to more accurately determine which documents in a group of documents are the most relevant to a particular query. Some methods include personalizing results based on user profiles, ranking results based on a specific location or set of locations and using search query trend data to improve results. Accordingly, methods that enhance the accuracy of search results are useful to search engines and their users.